I imagine loose formation would help to avoid getting ravaged too badly by things like Malice/Brilliance but in reality, no. I for one have never touched it.

I use these formations quite often, especially when I have support cruisers in my fleet. The tight cohesion really helps maximize these abilities, and the looser formations also help when you have lots of enemies to attack. Even if your target range is set to "gravity well", the ships in the fleet will only stray a certain distance from the flagship before being ordered to regroup. So if your enemy has lots of ships and structures, looser formations allows you to attack lots of these at once while tighter formation is good for either "local area" or "hold position" fighting against larger numbers (ie massive pirate fleets).

I dunno, even in loose I've watched my hoshiko rush a battleship without orders... makes me not want to even research demolition bots.

I usually only use tight formations. It seems like all my ships need to stick close together, get close to the enemy and just obliterate them. It's quite fun.


This is true, but when you use it with carrier ships, the carriers them selves still stay completely out of battle while the other ships do the work. I noticed this when using the Vasari. However if you have a few good protective capital ships, your support ships can survive quite a while.